


when i left you, you were young (i was gone, but not my love)

by violetinfidel



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Death, Sad, i dont know what to tag this apart from, i made myself almost cry writing this :(, i named his mother evelyn bc its a pretty name and i didnt have any better ideas, i started thinking about link's parents and this is what happened, im too sad and braindead to tag this better, so enjoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 13:09:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18739678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetinfidel/pseuds/violetinfidel
Summary: 'flyfeel your mother at your sidedon't you know you got my eyesi'll make you flyyou'll be happy all the timei know you can make it right'-"youth", glass animals





	when i left you, you were young (i was gone, but not my love)

**Author's Note:**

> some thoughts on why link is motherless but not fatherless.

It shouldn’t have happened the way it did. It shouldn’t have happened at all, of course. But especially not the way it did. 

Too early, for one thing. 

Evelyn had told him in early summer, a few weeks after she’d first found out: she was pregnant. It was terrifying at first. They were hardly a month married, and he’d just been promoted, and she was still trying to work out the seamstressing business. It wasn’t a planned thing. 

So they sat down together that night, while a summer storm raged outside, and they talked.

“I don’t know that I’m ready. But it’s your choice.”

“This isn’t an  _ I _ thing, dear. This is about both of us.”

She’s fidgeting with her ring (a thick band of silver, inlaid with opal, her favorite stone: he saved up for that thing for  _ years _ ) and he’s ignoring his dinner altogether, a rare occurrence (he made it for her, her favorite stew, its ingredients only in season for two months).

He sighs. “I don’t know,” He says. “I don’t. What’s going to happen to your career? You just started out on your own, isn’t this going to get in the way?”

“I think I’ll manage,” She tells him with a smile that’s both anxious and reassuring. “It isn’t something I can’t do while I’m laying down. What about you? Do you think the promotion is going to get in the way?”

“It isn’t much different from what I’ve been doing, but… If this is- if we’re committing to this, I don’t want any surprises, you know? I want this to be a priority, and- I don’t know.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“What do  _ you _ want to do?”

There’s a flash of lightning outside, and a few seconds later a clap of thunder so loud it rattles the windows. She lays her hand on his.

“I think I’d like to be a mother,” She says. He can see it in her: she’s always loved children (an older sister, herself), always been so sweet with the castle children when she visits him on the job, has always been the one to fawn over babies at the market (and the babies always,  _ always _ smile when they see her). “But only if you want to be a father.”

He stares at his bowl, the oil and broth separating, certainly gone cold and probably not worth eating anymore. He feels her rest her head on his shoulder, and he puts an arm around her shoulders and draws her into a hug, mindful of her stomach.

“I could give it a try,” He says, softly, and he can feel her smile against his shoulder.

She has no problem the first few months: not with the pregnancy, and not with her career. She’s in perfect health and she has a natural talent for working with fabric, and they don’t worry about the money so much anymore, and more importantly they’re  _ happy _ .

At the beginning of her solo career she struggles a little, but only a little. She’s not long out of apprenticeship and has no name established yet, but that’s an easy fix: she uses him as a model, and he doesn’t mind- even when the garments are experimental and, admittedly, a little ugly (but he’d never tell her that, and he doesn’t care anyway, because she made them). She finds her rhythm fast, as she always has, and then she no longer needs him to spread the word, but he still does, because he’s proud of her and he knows she loves to show off.

They share the news with his compatriots three months in- her circle has known since day one- and from then on she’s visiting him and the rest of his battalion weekly, often daily, never without something new to bring to them. Technically the policies forbid these kinds of visits but they go ignored, because Evelyn is too charming to refuse, and moreover she comes each time with a bribe (‘gifts,’ she calls them, and they all know better). 

For five months, they live happily and without worry, and their biggest source of stress is fretting over how to paint the baby’s room, and what kind of clothes to sew them.

Halfway through her fifth month, she starts getting sick. 

The first time is in the middle of the night, and they brush it off too easily. 

“The time change threw even my morning sickness off,” She jokes, sitting hunched over a pail, the blankets thrown off and her face pale in the moonlight.

He’s a worried husband by nature, insists that she bring it up to a midwife, someone who could give her answers, but she insists that she has one already. 

“This is normal,” She says, “The sickness and all. I’ll be alright. It’s supposed to ease up soon.”

It doesn’t. It gets worse, more frequent, stops being morning sickness and becomes just sickness. 

She doesn’t have fainting spells, exactly, but she has periods where she’s lightheaded and dizzy and can’t even sit up without nearly blacking out.

“Anemia,” Says the midwife who visits (one of their dear friends, by chance). “It’s very common at this point in the pregnancy. I can bring something by later for you to drink- it worked wonders for my sister.”

Evelyn is still pale, and her arm trembles ever so slightly as she reaches for her friend’s hand to hold. “Thank you,” She says. “Do I owe you anything?”

“Nothing but the usual gossip, once you’re feeling better,” She says with a gentle smile, and leaves, and closes the door quietly behind her.

Evelyn lays an arm across the pillows and rests her hand on his leg. “Stop crying, you big sap,” She says with gentle amusement, “You heard her, I’ll be fine.”

She gets worse.

She loses her appetite more frequently, gets sicker more often, and she should be gaining weight but she’s losing it. The visits to the castle stop- now he has to visit her at home, several times a day, to check up on her, make sure she eats  _ something _ . He steps down from his promotion, even as the income from her sewing stops (she’s too weak to even thread a needle these days). They’re back to struggling, but that’s okay: one less room in the house is a small price to pay to make sure she’s doing alright.

Six and a half months in, they get the heads-up, from the same friend who said she’d be fine only weeks ago. 

“I don’t like the way this is going,” She says to him.

Evelyn had slept for most of the day, woke up briefly to describe her symptoms and allow herself to be examined, and had gone right back to sleep. Most days she was too tired to even sit up, and he’d had to call in an unplanned vacation. And that was okay with him too; his friends could cover it, no sweat, and everyone loved Evelyn- if it meant she pulled through okay, they’d cover as long as he needed them to.

He’s holding her hand and trying to keep himself together.

“Fatigue isn’t unusual, but…” Concern is etched in every line of her face as she looks down at Evelyn, nestled under three blankets, sleeping like a dead woman. “This seems excessive. I might check her into something overnight for a little while. Just in case.”

She’s a stubborn woman, Evelyn is. An endearing trait, most of the time, but he can’t bring himself to argue with her, ill as she is.

“I’m not checking in anywhere,” She says, resting in a cocoon of cushions, working on her latest project. It’s a  crocheted blanket for their baby, a wool quilt of every color of yarn she could get her hands on (‘we don’t know what their favorite color will be,’ she explains, when he asks why so many). It’s only halfway finished, and she often laments that she may not complete it before the baby arrives. “It’s unnecessary. I’d rather be home.”

“I just- Lyn, sweetheart, I want to know that you’re being looked after properly-”

“And I am,” She says with all the conviction in the world, and when he sits down beside her she hugs him tightly. “It’s just a rough first time. That’s all. You’re doing wonderfully.”

He doesn’t feel that way, but he can tell she’s upset just as much as he is, so he says nothing more, and goes to start dinner. 

Seven months in she begins getting the cramps, and a week after that comes the blood. Finally it becomes too much for her to deny: something is wrong, and she needs more help than a part-time midwife can give her.

“All right,” She says, at four in the morning, laying on a towel with stabbing pains wracking her stomach, with barely the strength to lift the blankets over herself. “We can go.”

There’s a privilege to being the wife of a knight, and a privilege to being a well-liked one at that; he manages to find a carriage that will take them to the castle, and from there he manages to find her a place in the castle infirmary. Typically only very important individuals, mostly noble-born, are given this level of care and attention, but she’s a special case, and he would fight every single guard posted himself if it meant she got what she needed.

He rarely goes home after that. He’s worried sick, terrified that if he leaves for even a minute that something is going to happen (irrational, he knows- if something  _ does _ happen, he’s the last person who’d be able to  _ do _ anything). Sometimes he goes to get her things she asks for: blankets from home, that quilt she wants so desperately to finish, those color swatches so she can keep planning the baby’s room. There’s a barb of doubt tugging at the back of his mind, tearing at his heart, that she’s not going to ever see the fruit of her efforts. He tries to ignore it. (He can’t.)

And through all of this she’s somehow still bright, even as he worries himself half to death by her side. She insists that he get out, or at least get new people in to visit her (‘i love you to death,’ she teases him, ‘but i want some fresh faces. and you need to shave.’). She gets more visitors than she knows what to do with, all of their friends plus a dozen people she’s never met before, including a newer chef named Arcy who makes the best snickerdoodles they’ve ever tasted. She doesn’t normally take requests, but she makes whatever Evelyn asks of her, as long as she can give her a recipe. They become fast friends, and Arcy stops by with every meal to say hello and catch them up on the latest news.

Two weeks after she first comes to the castle, she goes into labor. 

Too soon. By more than a month. Not an acceptable margin of error. Not often a survivable one, for mother or for baby.

He’s not even there when it begins- he only finds out an hour after it starts, when a nurse finds him in the mess hall, and ushers him to the infirmary with pursed lips and restless eyes.

He sees her on the bed, trying to breathe in rhythm with the midwife that grips her hands.

“It’s…”

“Too soon,” Says the nurse gently. “Yes. We know.”

And for hours it goes like this: he sits on a chair beside her bed, arms around her, holding her damp hair back from her forehead, letting her squeeze his arm as hard as she needs to. He bleeds, but that’s okay- she bleeds too, and no one is optimistic.

At some point they ask him to step away, give her space, and it’s the hardest thing he’s ever been asked to do. She’s pale and clearly in so much pain and there’s so much  _ blood _ , and still no one seems sure of anything, and all he wants is to stay there and hold her through it. 

But she manages a weak, tired, pained smile, and she tells him it’s okay, and that she loves him, and that she loves the baby too, no matter what happens, and that’s the last thing she ever says, to him or to anyone else.

They let him stay in the room until the very end, and whether that’s a blessing from Hylia or the worst curse he’s ever known, he’ll never be quite sure. She bleeds, and she bleeds, and she bleeds, and he understands nothing except for that. 

He knew from the second he saw the white-faced nurse in the mess hall that things were not going to work out, but that was no preparation for hearing the words “I’m sorry” as the room goes quiet, ghostly silent for the first time in hours.

He can’t speak. He can hardly breathe. This isn’t something he wants to come to terms with.

“Not even…”

“She didn’t fully dilate. We can’t, not without cutting. And it’s so early, I don’t think it would make it-”

“Try.” His voice breaks. “Please.”

The midwife and the nurses exchange looks- it isn’t standard practice, particularly not when it’s such a premature delivery. But the midwife nods, and the nurse takes a deep breath.

“We’ll try,” She says gently, and exchanges her bloodstained gloves for a fresh white pair.

An hour and a half later, he’s handed a baby in a bundle of green terry cloth. It isn’t moving.

“I’m sorry,” The midwife says again, and there are tears in her eyes.

He cries. He sobs, that’s a more accurate word. There are no words for how he feels, of course, nothing to describe that soul-crushing, world-ending feeling of losing a wife and a child at once, all in the span of a few hours.

And a miracle, even as his whole future seems to collapse before him: the baby cries, too.

It startles him out of his grief for a moment, because they’d given him a still baby, and this baby is wailing its little lungs out, tiny and frail but fierce as the demon king himself. 

He cries again, but it’s a different kind of tears, still heartbroken but better now: something had wrenched this baby,  _ his _ baby, out of the icy jaws of death and back into his arms. 

He names his baby Link, after the hero, because no one short of a legend could pull through like that. 

Link is alive, but still so tiny, so vulnerable, and the nurses don’t let him leave with his baby for months. Development is compromised by premature birth, and particularly when the birth was so rough, so bloody, and Link hadn’t breathed for  _ minutes _ .

He moves into the castle, and it’s another of the hardest things he’s ever done.

He and Evelyn had made a home in town, and having to empty it just tears him apart anew. It isn’t a big place, certainly nothing upscale, but it’s full of memories, and he’s leaving behind an entire life as he sets his key underneath the doormat and loads the last of his bags onto the carriage. He’d never gotten around to painting the baby’s room, but that’s someone else’s problem, now. He’s only going to have the one room in the castle, and he can’t paint that.

The funeral is the second worst day of his life. It’s solemn, in spite of the bright cheer of the decorations; he knows she wouldn’t want that, but he can’t help the way he feels. Link can’t even be there, still too small, too susceptible to sickness. But he tells her what a wonderful job she did, feeling a little ridiculous for talking to a slab of stone. Their baby is alive, and getting stronger, and that’s all he could ever ask for, and she’d be happy to know. The quilt isn’t finished, but one day he’ll learn to crochet and he’ll tie up those loose ends, and it won’t ever be as skillful or as neat as hers, but it will be done, and there’s something to be said for that.

He leans very heavily on his friends for a long while. It’s not an easy task, managing his grief and caring for a newborn baby. He’s lucky to know the people he does. They know him sometimes better than he does, and they’re second parents to Link when he can’t be.

Link gets older, gets bigger and stronger against all odds (he knows that nothing was stacked in Link’s favor, not since he came out blue-faced and deathly still), and he can’t help but be so overwhelmingly proud of his child, his baby.

It doesn’t stop hurting, and he never stops missing her, but it gets easier- time dulls the ache and Link’s company soothes it sometimes, and there are people he can fall back on. 

Sometimes he’s sitting awake late at night trying to get them both to sleep, navigating the rough seas of parenthood alone, and he wonders if she’d be proud of him. And a sense of profound calmness washes over him, and Link actually stops crying and goes to sleep for once, and he likes to think that that’s her saying ‘yes’.


End file.
